Originally posted by Phelcher

Been playing MMORPG since the very first one.

 

This subject has been hashed out many, many times...  I use to have alot of charts/maps with all the data collected by in-game cartagraphers for testing world size, unfortuneatly, that HD that housed all that old data is no longer. I have a few older charts, but they are no longer significant, because those games worlds have increased in size.

 

One thing to stipulate when discusing world size is the actual game world. Is it real, or zoned? For instance, Everquest is zoned, while Vanguard is real. A real world is much harder to maintain (both financially & technically) but that also means 360 degree content. UNlike say WoW, where it is still zones (zone walls), but no zone time between the zones... it is still not a real world, so the content and game world are funneled to you.

 

Now as to your point.

Sorry, I have no difinitive #'s (sizes)to give you, (their exact figures no longer matter to me), because those lost charts said it all & as you get older (41) you forget exactness, but remember differences and Deltas.

Though, I think a big distinction should be made in regards to open worlds  -vs-   zoned ones... in terms of USABLE size.

  ps: Sorry it early and the Superbowl coverage has my attention. But this topic has been dear to me for nearly 12 years and I had considerable data that I was collecting for a blog. It's all lost, so has my energy and zeal on the topic.

Ask away...

It's a shame you lost the data, especially regarding the older MMO's as EQ, DAoC, UO, AC and AO it'd have been handy, as well as for Vanguard of which size seems hard to track down. If by any chance you might be able to dig up any of that remaining data that'd be appreciated.

As for zones vs seamless, I think what you're referring to is the amount of explorable area within the size of a world and true, that should be taken into account: for example, LotrO's Middle Earth isn't fully explorable, even the western area of it isn't, and the same applies to GW, although ANet seems to use the same sizes for the GW2 regions as has been used for GW, with the difference that in GW2 the whole map will be explorable.

I find worldsize and crossing distance to get a feel for how vast new, upcoming MMORPG's compared to current MMORPG's: regarding content and content density, I can get a feel for that, but it's the size of an MMO world added to that that gives me an indication how much there'll be to explore and to do.

Originally posted by Meowhead

Just as a minor sidenote, my MMO design in this thread http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/306154/page/2 handily outstrips the world size of all these games by a factor of at least several thousand, up to and including EvE (Once you factor in travel time)

Okay developers, hurry up and get to it! People want big game worlds!

But how much content fills it?

That's the reason games don't just randomly enlarge their game worlds.

It's not that it's not possible: it is.  It's fairly easy.   It's that players crave content rather than empty game worlds.

I recalled LotrO uses map coordinates, which makes more accurate measuring possible than I did with my former test, so I went back for another test, and this is what I came up with.

LotrO distances

To travel 10 coord. points either from N->S or E->W takes 5m15s

Celondim, the elven starter town in the west lies at (28.0S, 92.4W), near the stablemaster.

Bree west gate lies at (29.5S, 52.6W), Rivendell's west end near the stable master at (29.5S, 6.7W) and Elrond's house in Rivendell at  (29.5S, 3.3W).

Which makes the distance

- between Celondim and Rivendell roughly 45 min

- and between Bree and Elrond's house at Rivendell around 26 min, or 6.3 miles as the crow flies.

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Meowhead

Just as a minor sidenote, my MMO design in this thread http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/306154/page/2 handily outstrips the world size of all these games by a factor of at least several thousand, up to and including EvE (Once you factor in travel time)

Okay developers, hurry up and get to it! People want big game worlds!

But how much content fills it?

That's the reason games don't just randomly enlarge their game worlds.

It's not that it's not possible: it is.  It's fairly easy.   It's that players crave content rather than empty game worlds.

Considering that my theoretical game budget for this game was several trillion?  (Well, the guy DID say 'Given an unlimited budget, what kind of an MMO would you make.  I got tired of people saying 'An MMO just like the one I used to play back in the day, only more polished and with better graphics')  I'm assuming a ton of content!  If I'm going to pay tens of thousands of programmers to design procedural content generating programs, they better work it out, darn it.  :D

*cough* 

I was mostly joking about developers hurrying up and designing my MMO, since it would require brand new cutting edge hardware for every player (Subsidized of course, since I don't think your average person would want to shell out several thousand in hardware costs just to play an MMO) , an improved communication and GPS infrastructure across the whole world, and a lot of other big budget items.  ... but y'know, if the US decides not to spend any of their GNP some year, and donates it to me, I know what game I'll be designing, right?

I'm fully aware of the problems of filling a big world with suitably varied, dense and deep content. :<  Nothing you can't fix up with spending more money than WoW + SWToR + GW2 on game design though!  Some problems really do go away if you throw enough money at them. :D

Originally posted by Meowhead

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Meowhead

Just as a minor sidenote, my MMO design in this thread http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/306154/page/2 handily outstrips the world size of all these games by a factor of at least several thousand, up to and including EvE (Once you factor in travel time)

Okay developers, hurry up and get to it! People want big game worlds!

But how much content fills it?

That's the reason games don't just randomly enlarge their game worlds.

It's not that it's not possible: it is.  It's fairly easy.   It's that players crave content rather than empty game worlds.

Considering that my theoretical game budget for this game was several trillion?  (Well, the guy DID say 'Given an unlimited budget, what kind of an MMO would you make.  I got tired of people saying 'An MMO just like the one I used to play back in the day, only more polished and with better graphics')  I'm assuming a ton of content!  If I'm going to pay tens of thousands of programmers to design procedural content generating programs, they better work it out, darn it.  :D

*cough* 

I was mostly joking about developers hurrying up and designing my MMO, since it would require brand new cutting edge hardware for every player (Subsidized of course, since I don't think your average person would want to shell out several thousand in hardware costs just to play an MMO) , an improved communication and GPS infrastructure across the whole world, and a lot of other big budget items.  ... but y'know, if the US decides not to spend any of their GNP some year, and donates it to me, I know what game I'll be designing, right?

I'm fully aware of the problems of filling a big world with suitably varied, dense and deep content. :<  Nothing you can't fix up with spending more money than WoW + SWToR + GW2 on game design though!  Some problems really do go away if you throw enough money at them. :D

Heh well that's a very realistic attitude towards it!  I approve!

I miss there few games like Lineage 2, Ultima Online, Ragnarok online for ex. But this is realy nice thread! Thx for this info guys.

This is really cool I'm glad you took the time to gather and record your own info and compile it into a really nice list!

So in fact, compared to the earth, they are tiny.

Originally posted by alakram

So in fact, compared to the earth, they are tiny.

They are, in fact, tiny compared to Rhode Island. :)  Even SWG's planet content is smaller than Rhode Island, and that is one of the biggest mentioned.

Originally posted by cheyane

Very interesting indeed, I would have never guessed that LotRO was larger than WoW. That is an eye opener although I must admit the Turbine was a bit sneaky about hiding areas in very small passages like Rath Teraig in Erud Luin you could completely miss it easily if you did not actually know where it was.

I wasn't surprised. I actually saw a post once here that had the map scaled to a 1:1 scale between LotRO and WoW, and LotRO dwarfed it by a rather large magnitude (and this was pre-Moria / pre-Wrath). It becomes more obvious once you realize that one zone in LotrO is roughly the equivalent of roughly 3 average sized WoW zones. For example, the Shire is roughly 1/4th the size of the Eastern Kingdoms all by itself.

Originally posted by ZoeMcCloskey

Fallen Earth feels pretty big.

"The total map size is roughly 83 km by 83 km (the exact numbers would be 83.89 x 83.89), or roughly 7000+ square kilometers." - from Fallen Earth Wiki,

I just tested out the Rift's map size and found the OP calculations to be a bit off. First off, I don't know where this in-game "distance meter" is and I looked everywhere. I came to the conclusion that is takes approximately 30 seconds to go ~150 coordinates. Using that information I discovered:

North to South = 27 minutes

East to West = 30 minutes

Vanguard has the biggest game world out atm before the teleporters were implmented it took 2 hours to walk from one side of the continent to the other  thats on foot not with a mount with a mount it would cut it down alot .

Everquest while zoned it still was massive compared to most MMO's  same with Everquest 2 its another zoned game but its huge.

edit: nm

If this hasnt been posted already...

http://www.mmorpg.com/newsroom.cfm/read/16920

It might help you in your compairisons.

Originally posted by tkoreaper

I just tested out the Rift's map size and found the OP calculations to be a bit off. First off, I don't know where this in-game "distance meter" is and I looked everywhere. I came to the conclusion that is takes approximately 30 seconds to go ~150 coordinates. Using that information I discovered:

North to South = 27 minutes

East to West = 30 minutes

Ah, that's great, thanks!

I hadn't noticed the coordinates, but that's a far more accurate method to measure the distances. I did some quick tests with it, and came up with the same, approx 300 coord points in 60s.

This is what I found for the world map coordinates:

- northern map border 570, southern map border 8200: heigth = 7630 =  25m26s

- western map border 505, eastern map border 9620: width = 9115 = 30m23s

The distance meter you'll see on the minimap, for some objects or goals it projects the distance to it when you hover over the location point: run straight towards it, and you can find the run speed.

OP's data is very old.

Pre Outlands, pre Nothrend and pre Cataclysm numbers.

OPs data was accurate when?  2007?  5 years ago?

Why such sloppy work OP?

Originally posted by rokrow

OP's data is very old.

Pre Outlands, pre Nothrend and pre Cataclysm numbers.

 

OPs data was accurate when?  2007?  5 years ago?

 

Why such sloppy work OP?

? Did the continents Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms suddenly grow in size, what used to be a certain time to cross the Barrens suddenly taking double that time?

The information for the figures is found in the source links, also what these figures were linked to, the WoW tests done were pretty extensive. Sure, tBC added 2 regions on top of Eastern Kingdoms but it isn't hard to see when following that link what those size figures mean. But I'll add 'WoW vanilla' in the OP for those that don't want to bother reading source links.

The way I look at it, the land mass a typical player will transverse leveling to the at launch cap is not much smaller than one would have experienced doing the same thing in WoW at launch.

Of course, the very large downside is that the huge redundancy in WoW is great for playing alts, allowing a lot more variation each time one levels. That is mostly gone in Rift. (Good game + good alt experience + longest MMO play time for me).

I would also say that Rift makes much better use of the square kilometers. The zones, to me, feel at least four times larger than the raw numbers would indicate. There is great use of terrain. I think about how much space in a WoW zone like Wetlands is a complete waste of space. Rift fits a ton of content in each zone and does a great job of using terrain features to make it work.

While its nice to have large MMO worlds, the problem in most themepark games is that the larger the game world, the higher chance these zones will be completely deserted. A ton of WoW's zones are completely devoid of any player life, even after the changes done in Cataclysm. While its nice to have options when leveling alts, the majority of players will stick to whichever zones provide the fastest leveling experience - i.e. those which are closest to main city hubs and those that have the most quests in the tightest packed space. 

Personally I would much rather have a smaller world with far more content packed into each zone rather than having a giant world with quest hubs spread out all over the place. Once you go through and see the sights the first time, the novelty of a huge world wears thin, at least for me.